BuzzFeed The Onion Predicted Overstock.com’s New Video Streaming Site

Overstock.com just announced plans to start a streaming-video service, fulfilling a prophetic article from The Onion that outlined such plans a little more than a year ago.

The discount retailer told television executives at a conference yesterday that it will offer the service later this year with roughly 30,000 titles and eventually feature original content.

The Onion wrote a story in November 2013 headlined: “Overstock.com Announces Plans to Develop Original Programming.” The satirical news site's lead even specified a Tuesday announcement, which matches the date of the actual announcement.

Back in 2004, The Onion also successfully forecast the advent of a five-blade Gillette razor, which is now available on Amazon.

“We have this tremendous traffic, we're just trying to figure out what it is they're looking for next,” Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, said in real life yesterday, as per a video of his comments uploaded to YouTube. “We will be working partnering with a third-party that has content rights with all the major studios to begin with. our platform will start with AVOD, audio visual on demand….we anticipate also having an SVOD, that may start a subscription video on demand service.” (The Onion's article also specified a desire to “offer new content to the website's millions of customers.”)

“We're interested in original content,” Byrne said. “it isn't so much we're interested in producing although there is somebody talking to us about a reality TV show, but it's more we're interested in meeting the people who do make original content, and we think we can have a platform that is especially friendly to original content.”

Overstock president Stormy Simon told The Huffington Post that upon reading The Onion article, she thought: “It's hysterical….reading it today, I thought, 'This looks like a press release!'”